Electronic Arts (EA) one of the world’s leading video game developers and producers announced in a post the launch of EA AntiCheat (EAAC), a kernel-level anti-cheat system for PC games. At Electronic Arts, we are committed to creating a safe and fair experience for all of our players. As stated in our Player’s Charter, we ask everyone to respect the rules of the game and to refrain from tampering or using cheats. Our Game Security and Anti-Cheating team has been working hard to develop and support technologies that allow us to best protect the fair play interests of our players,” writes EA.
EAAC is a kernel-mode anti-cheat and anti-tamper solution developed in-house by Electronic Arts. Developers cheat software for the PC more and more deep into the kernel. The world’s video game developers and producers therefore need kernel-mode protections to ensure fair play and fight once morest developers of PC cheats on an equal footing.
Third-party anti-cheat solutions are often opaque to our teams and prevent us from implementing additional privacy controls or customizations that provide greater accuracy and granularity for EA’s own game modes, EA says. With EAAC, we have complete ownership of the security and privacy posture, allowing us to address security issues as they arise.
According to EA, is anti-cheat at the kernel level necessary depending on the games. For games that are highly competitive and contain many online modes, like FIFA 23, kernel mode protection is absolutely vital. When cheat programs operate in kernel space, they can render their functions invisible to anti-cheat solutions that operate in user mode.
Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a huge increase in cheats and kernel-mode cheating techniques. So the only reliable way to detect and block them according to EA is to make anti-cheat solutions work in this space as well. With FIFA 23 we will see new and exciting cross play features. In addition to the EAAC protecting our PC players from cheaters, our console players playing once morest PC opponents will also be protected once morest cheaters operating on PC platforms.
Since not all games are competitive multiplayer games, EA works to determine anti-cheat requirements for each project. For single player titles, or titles without competitive ladders or leaderboards, the cheating landscape differs. Depending on the title and game type, EA may implement other anti-cheat technologies, such as user mode protections, or even forego anti-cheat technology altogether in some cases, opting instead to design the game to be resistant to certain types of cheats.
Cheat software developers use single player game modes to reverse engineer or experiment with doctored game files to help them develop a cheat and then bring those modifications back into online multiplayer game modes. In addition to preventing active cheating during online play, EAAC also prevents developers from cheating using single player game modes in this manner. The protection of single player game modes is necessary to hinder the development of cheating.
EAAC only works when a game with EAAC protection included is running. All anti-cheat processes stop when the game is launched. If you have uninstalled all of your EA games with EAAC protection, EAAC will automatically uninstall and remove itself from your PC. It is also possible to uninstall manually at any time and it will be completely removed from the PC. Note that by uninstalling EAAC, all games that require EAAC protection (like FIFA 23) will not be playable until EAAC is reinstalled.
Some users are wary that granting such a low-level set of system permissions might expose private information on their systems. In an attempt to allay some of these fears, Elise Murphy, senior director of game security and fraud at EA said the team has limited the information collected by EAAC and the system will only look than it needs for anti-cheat purposes.
Anything short of a process that tries to interact with our game is strictly prohibited, she continued. We have worked with independent and third-party IT security and privacy companies to ensure that EAAC operates with data protection in mind.
In addition to privacy concerns, some users might fear that a new kernel-level driver might destabilize or hamstring their system (like Sony’s infamous DRM rootkits). But Murphy promised that EAAC is designed to be as capable and lightweight as possible. EAAC will have a negligible impact on your game.
Kernel-level tools can also provide an attractive new attack surface for low-level security exploits on a user’s system. To account for this, Murphy said his team has worked with independent and third-party security and privacy assessors to validate that EAAC does not degrade the security of your PC and to ensure strict limits on the privacy of give . She also promised daily testing and constant monitoring of reports to address any potential issues that surfaced.
Source : Electronic Arts
And you?
What do you think of the anti-cheat system offered by EA?
In your opinion, are the reasons given by Elise Murphy, director at EA, relevant?
are you for or once morest such a system?
See as well :
